The Boy Who Played with Fusion

by Tom Clynes

  “Hey”—he shrugged and pulled open the workshop door—“some people work on cars.”

  17

  * * *

  Twice as Nice, Half as Good

  TAYLOR WAS NOT ONLY twice blessed—with his intellect and his parents—but thrice blessed, with a school environment that could accommodate his personality and learning style. And yet, St. James Day School, which had worked so well for Taylor, wasn’t working nearly as well for Joey by the time he reached the upper-elementary level.

  Joey was as smart as Taylor—in fact, he scored consistently higher on every standardized test—but he didn’t have his brother’s luck of the draw when it came to teachers, or his talent for self-advocacy. He had shown an early aptitude for math, and he wanted to tackle more advanced material. “But unfortunately,” says Dee Miller, head of the school, “at the time, we had a teacher who was not as flexible as what we would want.”

  Kenneth and Tiffany went in and asked the teacher if he could give their son some more challenging work. But, according to Kenneth and to Miller, the teacher told them, “We will only give him more of what everyone else is doing.”

  “Teaching to the middle doesn’t work, never has,” says Darren Rip­ley, who taught upper-level math to both brothers. “To say we’re all at an Algebra Two level just because we’re in the tenth grade just isn’t accurate. It also isn’t effective.”

  Joey’s learning style was similar to Taylor’s learning-through-talking style, though quieter. “I learn through testing,” he says. “I go to the lectures, take the tests, but I never study. With some stuff, it takes being in the test to draw the connections. I usually come out knowing things I didn’t know going in. I think I’d psych myself out if I tried to study; I’d be more anxious.”

  If my son told me that, I’d be skeptical. But with Joey, the proof was on the paper (and the shower door). When he took the ACT college-admissions test in the seventh grade (he didn’t want to take it and stayed up the night before until 1:00 a.m., in protest), he scored in the top 99.9th percentile in math; in other words, he was a math prodigy. Even in fourth grade, he was clearly mathematically gifted, and yet his teacher insisted that he do the same work his classmates were doing—even though he had already mastered it.

  “He was miserable in class,” says Miller, “especially his last year here.”

  Nell’s weekly yoga sessions, which were a big hit with Taylor’s and Joey’s classmates, came to an end when Taylor was in the sixth grade. After Nell had a round of chemotherapy, the family traveled with her to an alternative-medicine detoxification clinic in Mexico, where she bounced back briefly. But once she got home, her decline accelerated. In desperation, Tiffany brought her to another clinic in Arizona, but shortly after they returned, Nell passed away. At the memorial service, Taylor sang “Amazing Grace.”

  “Everyone missed her coming to school to do yoga with us,” Taylor’s friend Ellen Orr says. “And for a while, Taylor and Joey got really quiet. Then Taylor started getting more excited about this idea he had, to use nuclear fusion to make medical isotopes.”

  Nell’s death affected her older grandson in profound ways, some of which would become apparent only years later. Like any child, Taylor reacted with grief and anguish. But he also had another, more unusual response—a sense of defiance that led to a spark of inspiration and a vision of a future in which he would change the world through nuclear fusion.

  But the success of his nuclear reactor would depend, in large part, on achieving the extremely high voltages and vacuum pressures that had eluded him in his attempt to build his particle accelerator. Unfortunately, the specialized high-voltage feedthroughs and high-precision vacuum flanges and seals that physics laboratories use were still out of his reach financially.

  “I remember,” Willis says, “how much back-and-forth there was on the Fusor.net forum about how Taylor could get good vacuum seals on the cheap. He had good ideas, and it seemed like he was making pretty good progress, considering his constraints.”

  When his grandmother’s house went up for sale, Taylor moved his lab to the Little House, the two-story shed in his backyard. He searched the Internet for low-cost parts that he could adapt for his fusor’s reaction chamber, its power supply and vacuum pump, and its various fittings and electrical components. To finance his purchases he started a business assembling and selling small radioactive check sources, which are used to confirm the proper operation of instruments such as Geiger counters. Taylor made the sources by crushing up small, nonhazardous amounts of uranium ore and thorium lantern mantles, then inserting them inside small test tubes and sealing them in epoxy glue. The business experienced a mini-boom when an environmental contractor bought forty sources for training purposes.

  Working in the Little House and at the Coke plant, Taylor started to assemble his machine out of the hodgepodge of secondhand equipment he’d collected. But the low-budget approach turned out to be frustrating; parts often didn’t fit together, and without access to a proper machine shop, he often ended up making additional purchases and retrofits.

  Taylor had thought that once he got to middle school, he’d find well-outfitted science laboratories and “people who knew stuff,” as he put it, who could help him with his projects. “But the labs were outdated,” says classmate Ellen Orr, who continued, with Taylor, to Texas Middle School. “And no one knew anything about the stuff he was talking about or took an interest in helping him move ahead.”

  Tiffany and Kenneth had worried about whether Taylor would be accepted by the other students at Texas Middle School. But he quickly fell in with a crowd who appreciated his somewhat squirrelly and decidedly nonmasculine nature. Socially, seventh grade was working out for him. But intellectually, it was a washout.

  “All they could offer was regurgitation,” Taylor says. “There was no exploration or discovery; it was just ‘fill in the blanks.’ And it moved sooo slow.”

  Forcing a highly gifted child to work at the average student’s pace is, Lisa van Gemert told journalist Susan Freinkel, “like forcing an adult to play an endless game of Candy Land.” Gemert, a gifted-youth specialist for American Mensa, says these children will ultimately drop out, either literally or figuratively. “They may turn their frustration inward and become depressed and self-destructive, or turn it outward and mouth off to teachers and stir up mischief.”

  Taylor quickly found himself at intellectual odds with his science teacher. “She was incompetent,” says Ellen Orr bluntly. In his Integrated Physics and Chemistry class, Taylor butted heads incessantly with the instructor. “She was teaching from the standard physics textbook, which was outdated,” says Ellen. “She’d ask a question and Taylor would cite newer evidence that conflicted with the textbook answer.” For instance, teacher and textbook taught that atoms had only three parts—protons, neutrons, and electrons. But on quizzes and tests, Taylor said, “I’m not putting that answer down, ’cause it’s not right.”

  “He’d launch into a lecture on the six flavors of quarks [the fundamental particles that combine to form protons and neutrons],” Ellen says. “I still remember the weird names: up, down, strange, charm, bottom, and top. And while he was at it he’d want to explain the forces that kept them together. He’d be like, ‘New research says . . .’ and everyone would start getting fed up.”

  The fact that he was right didn’t make it any easier for Taylor, who had been used to getting his way when it came to education (and just about everything else). But his school’s educators didn’t have the skills to recognize how he learned best or the resources to accommodate it if they did. With so many students struggling to grasp the basics, there was no time to let a kid prattle on about technetium-99 or the esoteric behaviors of baryons and mesons.

  Midterm exams came and went, and Taylor stuck to his guns, refusing to put down technically wrong answers. “Newton’s understanding of gravity was limited!” he lectured his teacher one day. “Einstein figured out that gravity is not a force, but a cu
rvature.”

  “I was sitting in the room after class,” says Ellen, “when the teacher called Tiffany and told her Taylor was failing.”

  Taylor and Ellen were reaching another of Kerr’s stages of vulnerability. Adolescence is a time of great change, when boys and girls need to develop effective coping mechanisms before the additional stresses of high school. All too often, they don’t. Puberty is, of course, a minefield for both sexes, and middle schools have not solved the riddles of how to guide students through it. The problem is not unique to North America. Dr. Stephen Tommis, former director of the Hong Kong Academy for Gifted Education, says, “Without genuine understanding and the right kind of emotional and educational support, [gifted children] sometimes start to fall apart almost as soon as they reach upper primary or junior secondary school.”

  “The peer pressure to be obedient to gender roles intensifies, especially for gifted kids,” says Kerr. “Girls learn that it’s okay to be smart if you’re pretty and popular. Suddenly they’re no longer reinforced by their talents but their ability to achieve a boyfriend.” Gifted boys are particularly vulnerable if they become aware that their peers associate academic achievement with compliance. “Boys see noncompliance as a sign of masculinity,” says Kerr. “They don’t want to be the teacher’s pet. So gifted boys will often underachieve as a way of establishing masculinity with other boys.”

  Numerous studies confirm a sad finding: intellectually gifted students typically have little good to say about their schooling. “They’re usually bored,” says Winner, “and they tend to be highly critical of their teachers, who, they feel, know less than they do.” When ability grouping or other acceleration isn’t an option, says Winner, the best-case scenario is a teacher who recognizes a student as gifted and lets the child learn independently. The worst-case scenario is a teacher who fails to recognize giftedness and brands the child as unmotivated or hostile.

  Taylor had fallen out of the nurturing cocoon of his elementary school, where the system could flex to fit a student’s needs, and into the harsh “industrialized model” of education, which demands that students fit into the system. Education and creativity expert Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED talk “How Schools Kill Creativity” has been viewed more than thirty million times, notes that our educational system developed from a factory culture. “We still educate children in batches, with ringing bells, days divided into forty-minute bits, children separated into age groups.” The system punishes those who slow the assembly line and creates a culture of conformity. “We are educating people out of their creative capacities,” says Robinson. “School is not challenging them, firing up their imaginations.”

  But if gifted kids are so smart, won’t they find their own way? Those who work with gifted and talented children say that’s among the biggest misconceptions. “There’s this idea that they don’t need much help, and it’s clear that’s not the case,” says Vanderbilt researcher David Lubinski. In one long-term study, Lubinski found that supersmart kids will often do “just well enough” if they’re stuck in regular classrooms that can’t accommodate the rapid rates at which they learn; they won’t come close to their full potential.

  The exceptionally talented often become invisible in the classroom. “When students enter on day one having already mastered the material, teachers immediately shift to the underachievers who are struggling,” says Lubinski. Fast learners tend to escape criticism, but if they lack challenging coursework that incorporates their interests, they lose motivation. The dropout rate among students in the gifted range may be as high as 5 percent, but more commonly, potential high achievers who are unengaged just “get through” the school day. One study, by the University of Iowa’s Belin-Blank Center, found that nearly half of gifted kids are underachieving.

  In America, an academically or artistically gifted child’s ability to develop his or her talents depends, to a tremendous extent, on where that child lives. A lucky kid who’s stagnating in a local school may be able to transfer to a more stimulating environment if she lives near a magnet school or a town that offers advanced content. “An unlucky gifted kid,” says Winner, “usually just starts to hate school.”

  Tiffany and Kenneth could see that neither of their children was getting what he needed from his school. But with this issue, the couple’s problem-solving abilities had hit a wall. On both sides of the state border in Texarkana, the public schools do not excel. And among local private schools (most of which lean heavily on the Bible and lightly on intellectual development), St. James was an outlier, with no counterpart in the higher grades.

  “This is a town,” Dee Miller says, “that doesn’t really value education.”

  Nikita Khrushchev probably did more to boost gifted education in America than anyone else. “The Sputnik launch provoked all kinds of support and programs for talented kids, and acceptance of approaches like acceleration and grade-skipping,” says Rena Subotnik, who directs the Center for Gifted Education Policy at the American Psychological Association.

  The boom years for bright kids continued into the 1970s. Options expanded with the growth of talent searches, school-pullout programs, scholarships, summer residential programs, math and science Olympiads, and early college admissions. Suddenly, even basket-case school districts were throwing together gifted-and-talented (G&T) programs. Some were well conceived and executed; others were slapdash or wildly experimental. But all were hobbled by the fact that they could draw on very little quality research as to what actually worked in gifted education. That research eventually started flowing as funding arrived and specialized academic centers began to produce authoritative studies that shed new light on this segment of the population.

  But providing gifted children with an education that matched their abilities hit an ideological roadblock in the late 1980s and early 1990s. America’s Sputnik inferiority complex dissolved with the breakup of the Soviet Union, and academics began searching for a wider, more democratic conception of human excellence. Specialized education for the academically talented came under attack, swept up in a tide of anti-elitism.

  “The word gifted itself didn’t help,” says researcher Paula Olszewski-Kubilius, “with its implication that the kid got something other people don’t have, and he should just be satisfied with that.”

  During the 1990s, programs for high achievers were cut back or eliminated. Even as a growing body of research confirmed the effectiveness of practices like ability grouping, acceleration by subject, and grade-skipping, these low-cost or no-cost solutions fell out of favor due to concerns about inequality and fears—which were not supported by research—that acceleration hurt children socially and hurried them out of childhood.

  “The idea of singling out a few kids for special treatment offended egalitarian sensibilities,” says Winner. The discomfort level rose if those kids were well-off whites who already had access to the best schools and widest opportunities. Outspoken researchers such as Samuel Lucas, a Berkeley sociologist who studies inequality in education, raised politically fraught questions about whether schools should be in the business of segregating elite students and thereby exacerbating inequality—especially inequality linked to race and class. Lucas wasn’t necessarily against efforts to identify and serve gifted children, but he warned—with significant justification—that such programs would inevitably be gamed by well-off parents who would find ways to get their children in and then fight to ensure that the gifted set got better teachers and curricula, newer technology, and more funding. It’s difficult, says Lucas, not to “end up with another system for those at the top to reinforce that they belong there.”

  Advocates for gifted children say concerns about elitism miss the point: kids of all abilities deserve an education that identifies each student’s needs and gives that student the support to develop his or her gifts, whatever they may be. Nevertheless, dedicated G&T programs started declining and disappearing, first in liberal college towns such as Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Ann Arbor, Mi
chigan; they were more likely to persevere or enjoy early comebacks in more conservative suburban districts. “The more PC the community, the less likely it is to have a dedicated program,” says Winner.

  In university towns, dedicated gifted programs were already stressed by über-educated parents’ demands for access. In the mid-1990s, when the Ann Arbor public schools were exploring alternatives to serve gifted students, the district sent out a survey to parents, remembers Lee Ann Dickinson-Kelley, assistant superintendent of instruction and student support services. Among other questions, parents were asked about their children’s talents.

  “What percentage of the respondents do you think thought their child was gifted?” Dickinson-Kelley asked me. “Ninety-nine percent,” she answered. “I’m not kidding you.”

  After the turn of the millennium, a long-overdue focus on the nation’s underachievers further overshadowed the educational needs of high achievers (and many other aspects of education). “Odd though it seems for a law written and enacted during a Republican Administration,” wrote Time magazine’s John Cloud, “the social impulse behind No Child Left Behind is radically egalitarian. It has forced schools to deeply subsidize the education of the least gifted, and gifted programs have suffered.”

  When the law took effect, in 2003, the federal government and the states began pulling funding away from G&T programs. Illinois cut sixteen million dollars, New York fourteen million, Michigan four and a half million. Although some states maintained fairly large G&T budgets (Iowa’s was close to thirty-six million in 2014), about a dozen states now spend nothing at all on gifted programs.